A newly released account of Schubert's celebrated C major Symphony is a coming together of Titans as a masterpiece is taken on by Claudio Abbado and his Orchestra Mozart.
Inevitably, there is a sense of poignancy to this performance, recorded live, over a series of concerts in 2011, with the
conductor, in his last years, revisiting a composer whose music had been with him since the beginning of his career.
Schumann famously extolled this score's "heavenly lengths", although that particular epithet is not guaranteed in uninspired renditions, which can reduce Schubertian joys to an onerous trudge. Not so here, as Abbado revels in the work's architectural span and sense of space, observing every repeat and taking the magnificent music-making to just over an hour.
The first movement is a tour de force; only a special orchestra could respond to that opening horn call with the same lilt and grace as these musicians do. Throughout, the symphonic weave beguiles with its naturalness, presented in a series of elegantly contoured waves of sound.
Abbado enjoys the catchy march of the Andante con moto, as it shifts between perky minor and yearning major. There is a sense of the balletic here, and one could well imagine Prokofiev, in the next century, gleefully peppering it with his trademark astringencies.
